Ha ha!

You certainly never know what movie he'll review next!

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Burl reviews Teen Lust! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here, reviewing a movie with a great title:
Teen Lust! That’s what it
was called on my video box at any rate; when it was originally released, it
carried the title High School Teasers! Either one will do for a movie
like this, really, ha ha!

Carol, our protagonist (played by Kristin “Friday the 13th part 2”
Baker, ha ha) has a perfidious b*yfriend, Terry (Perry “Alligator” Lang, ha ha, who was also of course in Spring Break), and a devil-may-care best friend named
Neeley! She also has a monstrously dysfunctional family, with a simpering
drunkard for a mother, a leering letch of a father and a proto-slacker brother
who wears a housecoat all day! Carol and Neely have joined some kind of police
work-experience program, which means they spend their days detailed to a pair
of busy-fingered cops! This pleases neither Terry, nor Neely’s boyfri*nd
Hotrod, nor the creepy “Give Daddy a kiss!” father, nor the dyspeptic mother!
The latter plans to marry Carol off to Dustin, the trust-fund slowbones next
door!

Whew! Enough plot already; time to hit the beach! No such
luck, though! First, to please her mother, Carol must attend Dustin’s birthday
party (“Why would you want to celebrate the birth of a moron?” asks Dad), which
is predictably a disaster! Then it’s time for a confrontation with comedy-drunk
Mom, which Carol treats as a scene from an After School Special (“You’re
tearing me apart!” is her climactic cri-de-coeur) and the mother slurs
her way through as though Lucy has accidentally gotten into the vanilla again!
It all ends in hugs, violin music and Mom’s surreptitious sips on a giant wine
bottle!

There are a more antics to come! In a bog-standard teen s*x
scene, the boyfriends dress up as girls to sneak in past the parents for an
erot*c pyjama party, coyly flirt*ng with Dad on the way up the stairs! But
Carol is too preoccupied by Terry’s hound-dogging ways with the local fl*ozy,
De De, to make the most of the opportunity, and before much happens the
maniacal WWII veteran father chases the boys out a window! There are a few
scenes ripped straight from the Van Nuys Blvd. playbook – a hard-case
cop busts a hot-rodder for having open pipes and then ends up handcuffed in his
und*rwear!Later still, there’s a very odd scene in which Carol and
Terry, having made up, are attacked by a gang of ten year-olds, who destroy
Terry’s car then chase Carol across a field and rip off her cl*thes!

It gets even weirder! Carol has another confrontation with
her mother after discovering the randy, sailor-capped plumber (played by the
great George “Buck” Flower, of The Fog)
getting a little too involved with the family plumbing, ha ha! Mom explains
that the plumber is really her l*ver, and moreover has been for years; Dad, his
lascivi*us behaviour notwithstanding, is imp*tent and is in fact a virg*n;
brother Ted is most likely the plumber’s son, and Carol herself was adopted! We
then rush into a scene of the devastated Carol strolling with a priest and
describing not her family problems, but her nightly dreams of being r*ped by
“all different people, not just men!” In turn, the priest confesses that he
himself is “sweet,” and asserts that love is the most important thing of all!
“All Hitler really needed was a hug,” the priest tells her! “Not that he was my
type, ha ha!”

Domestic events come to a head as Dad falls down the stairs,
the angry plumber tries to attack him with a pipe wrench, and Carol discovers
that her real mother is a black masseuse named Lena! Then there’s a pie fight,
and Carol almost marries the basket-case Dustin while showing signs of having
inherited her adoptive mother’s taste for booze! The wedding becomes yet
another crazy melee, and, in a nod to The Graduate, Carol drives off
with a different beau – not Terry, but one of the cops – as the families jump
around in the background! Nobody ever does make it to the beach, ha ha!

It
goes without saying that Teen Lust is a strange bird! With all the crazy
domestic trauma it seems as though the movie might have been meant as a parody
of the After School Special genre; though, if so, nobody told the actress
playing Carol! I don’t know what they told her, frankly! I would like to point
out that the picture was directed by James Hong, the actor who played Hannibal
Chew in Blade Runner and David Lo Pan
in Big Trouble In Little China! Ha
ha, that’s weird! I’m going to give Teen
Lust two Neelies!